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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25838170">Knocking</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquirrelGay/pseuds/SquirrelGay'>SquirrelGay</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F, Nightmares, Oneshot, POV Hermione Granger</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:08:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,932</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25838170</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquirrelGay/pseuds/SquirrelGay</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Whenever Hermione has a nightmare, Fleur comes knocking at her door.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Fleur Delacour &amp; Hermione Granger, Fleur Delacour/Hermione Granger</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>212</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Knocking</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Found this draft in my folder and, yeah.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>For someone so smart, I was really oblivious for a while.</p><p>When I met Fleur, we were both still young. It’s easy to make fast opinions about people, especially when you’re an angsty teenager. I never gave her a chance, just tagged along with Ginny’s made-up nicknames and didn’t think much about it. A couple of years after that I learned I had made a mistake.</p><p>When I was at Shell Cottage during the war, I was a bloody mess. I remember being in that room, alone, and every time I closed my eyes I was back at that dreadful place. If the silence went on for too long, I started hearing that manic laughter. I woke up many times trashing around, not hearing anything else other than my own screaming. And yet, Fleur knocked before entering every time she came to check on me. I never heard the gentle knocks, or the door opening, or her slow, careful steps. I could only come back to the present once she was close enough to softly hold me in her arms. After that she always calmed me down with soothing words, then brushed my hair and gave me a potion so I could have a dreamless sleep. She was there every single night, and it didn’t matter how long it took, she always stayed with me until my breathing went back to normal and I could lay back down.</p><p>Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if she hadn’t showed up one night, or at all.</p><p>After the war was finally over, we all lived at the Burrow while we sorted out our lives. Fleur’s room wasn’t close to the one I shared with Ginny, but she always seemed to just <em>know</em>. I told myself she must have been a light sleeper and I managed to wake her up, even if I had gotten better at not making that much noise. I could hear the soft knocking on the door now. Her company was very much welcomed. Whenever I had a nightmare she came knocking, and I grabbed some shoes and we went outside for a walk. Sometimes talking, sometimes not. Always close to each other. We used to walk until I had calmed down enough. Then we went back inside and made some tea, the muggle way, because it took longer.</p><p>I used to question her about it. At some point I wondered if veelas had some sort of sixth sense. But she told me it was nothing special, that she somehow just knew when to knock, and that sometimes it was her the one who needed the company, and she wondered how I managed to be up just in time. I felt selfish then, because I had only been thinking of myself. Surely, being in a house with people who hadn’t been that friendly towards her, and her being so far from home, it must have been hard too. After that I started paying more attention. I started noticing how sometimes the way she knocked would be quieter than usual, as if she was ashamed of asking to come in, those days I always managed to fake a smile for her, and she faked one in return. I tried to be there for her as a way to thank her for having been there for me.</p><p>We did learn a lot about one another back then.</p><p>It wasn’t just the two of us every night in the Burrow, more than once a week we found Harry already awake by the time we made it back to the house. He wouldn’t ask any questions, he would just invite us to sit near the fireplace to have a midnight snack. I knew he had nightmares too, but we never talked about it, not explicitly at least. After going through so much together, we only had to share a look to understand what was going on. Fleur seemed to sense it but she never asked me or Harry about it. It became sort of a routine for us, we were a damaged version of a ‘Midnight Club’. The three of us grew closer during those quiet nights. During the day everyone seemed fine, and we started to move on, but nights were always harder for us. This type of thing was one of the reasons why Harry and I decided to share an apartment after we moved out. That and the fact that we had similar experiences and knowledge when it came to both muggle and wizarding worlds. We were almost like siblings. Ron never seemed to understand that.</p><p>He couldn never look past his jealousy, and it was one of the things that drove us apart from each other in the end. We tried, we really did, but we were just so different. He couldn’t understand why Harry and me rejected most of the interviews, why we almost never attended social gatherings or big celebrations, why we sometimes preferred to just go to a small muggle town to spend the weekend. He, of course, rejoiced being the center of attention. I understood why he did, but he never made an effort to understand why I didn’t. In the end we agreed that we just weren’t good for each other.</p><p>The day we broke up, Harry was away. I was alone when I heard someone knocking softly on the door. Fleur said that she just felt like it was the right time to visit. And even if we had fallen a little out of touch, it felt as if no time had passed. We went out for a walk and then came back for some tea. I told her everything about Ron while she listened and played with my hair. Her presence made me feel like everything would be okay.</p><p>After that, Fleur’s visits became a regular thing. But they were never planned. I remember thinking that it was weird how, whenever I had a rough night, I always woke up to the sound of someone knocking, and since Harry’s room was farther away from the door, it was me who opened the door for her. Sometimes she made some excuse for her visit, but they were never necessary. Thinking about it, I didn’t even wait for the knocks some days, I just woke up and opened the door because I <em>felt</em> like I had to, and Fleur would be on the other side.</p><p>We would wait for Harry to wake up and then have breakfast together. Sometimes I cooked, sometimes Fleur brought the food with her, and sometimes Harry invited us out to have breakfast at some muggle restaurant he knew. It was common to have Bill tag along at first, and it was a nice change to our usual group of three. Being an observant person, I could always see how they complimented each other. And I also saw when they stopped doing it. The less we saw of Bill, the more common it was for me to find things that were <em>wrong</em> between them. I couldn’t tell what had happened, but whatever I had seen between them slowly disappeared.</p><p>More and more we opened the door to a duller Fleur, with tired eyes and the faint scent of loneliness around her. She confessed to us that she wasn’t sure what had changed, either him, or her, or everything else. But it just wasn’t the same anymore, and she wasn’t sure if it could go back to what it was.</p><p>The divorce came as a shock to everyone except Harry and me. Molly was the most affected, not even Bill seemed as angry as she was. He confessed to me that it was starting to be too much for him too, one night that we went out for drinks to get away from everything. He was resigned, defeated, but not as sad as I expected. After enough beers, he spoke of how he still loved her, and he was sure she loved him too. They just grew apart, somehow. He started thanking me for being there, for not jumping to conclusions about Fleur, for being a friend. I felt bad hearing this, but I wasn’t sure why. I just felt like he was lying, even if he was telling his truth. I just drank enough for the feeling to go away so I could continue to be there for him. The more he talked about her, the heavier the feeling in my stomach was, and the more I drank. Harry had to come get us eventually.</p><p>I can still remember the hangover we both had after that night.</p><p>Sometime after that. Harry and I decided it was time to try new things. He and Ginny moved in together and I found a place for myself. It was big enough for me and Crookshanks and my books. Fleur had moved back to France to be closer to her family. We were moving on with our lives. My nightmares were almost gone, so there was no Fleur knocking at my door, I had bittersweet feelings about that. But we wrote to each other often. It got to a point when Harry would ask me when he wanted to know how Fleur was doing, and Fleur often mentioned the questions her family asked her about me at the end of her letters.</p><p>I really had no idea of what was happening.</p><p>Somehow, and without me knowing, I had fallen in love with her. I realized what had happened one day, and it all came falling down into place. Everything was making more sense the more I thought about it. The way we talked to each other, how we had learned to care for each other, how I got more excited when I saw her than when I saw any of my other friends. The way one day I started thinking about her and never stopped. We knew each other so well, after the initial shock of my realization I wasn’t surprised at all. I could see us working well together, I was already seeing us gravitating towards each other. The thought of her not feeling the same way crossed my mind, and it made me doubt. But I couldn’t just stand there and let my insecurities win. </p><p>It was the middle of the night when I got there, I knocked softly at her door. She had been crying, I looked at her eyes and my heart ached for her, we didn't need words for this sort of things anymore. I made tea, the muggle way, and after she calmed down, we went for a walk. We didn’t talk, we just walked until she grabbed my hand and lead the way back to her apartment. I thought about not telling her what I had discovered, about going back to my place and wait for another day to tell her. But she stopped me before I could walk out the door. She didn’t say anything, she just looked me in the eyes, I could almost feel her poking around in my mind. Somehow, she just <em>knew</em>.</p><p>It would have happened eventually, but I'm glad I stayed that day.</p><p>Now, whenever I have a nightmare, which isn’t that often anymore, I don’t hear any knocking on the door. I just feel Fleur softly taping my arm, whispering something in my ear, small gestures to bring me back to the present, to bring me back to her. When I come back she looks at me, I smile and she hugs me and then we go back to bed.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>They are soulmates but not really but also yes, yes they are.</p><p>(Edit): I changed some stuff and corrected typos but the overall feel is still the same.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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